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Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

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Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#171

Post by liveoneggs »

karatestomp wrote: post #9
_bxg1 wrote: post #3

This is the latest in a string of incidents where critical software systems, facing new pressure due to the pandemic, are catastrophically failing their users. I think what's happened in the past is that most public-facing software systems either a) were not really critical (because people had the alternative of doing things in-person), or b) (as in the case of all the ancient COBOL systems underpinning the US gov) h…

We keep making a bunch of products where protocols and existing software would do just fine, while hitting fewer edge cases. Know what would be better than the ten goddamn apps and the iPad and shit they're using for our kid's school? Mailed (or emailed) worksheet packets with guidance, recorded lessons on Youtube. Mail back the worksheets, have the food-delivering schoolbuses pick them up, drop them off at the schoo…

yeah my 6 y/o hates remembering passwords. Fear of getting her password wrong almost made her afraid to use computers at all

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#172

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

droopyEyelids wrote: post #108
coffeefirst wrote: post #49

"Our system broke, you're screwed now, sorry" is never an acceptable answer. Do they really not have anyone who knows how to get stuff done? 1. Take the files and figure out what to do with them so they can be read. This isn't a hard problem. 2. Ask everyone affected to email you the photo or a new photo of the documents. We'll just take it on trust that you do so honestly because there's no way you would've seen thi…

To be realistic, that is an acceptable answer if the person being screwed lacks alternatives and negotiating power. You mean "I don't want 'you"re screwed, sorry' to be an acceptable answer" and I get that, but I'm committed to using honest language about this because thats we you train ourselves to be wary and give these situations the respect they deserve.

No, it's not acceptable. They might be able to get away with it, but that doesn't make it okay.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#173

Post by Alupis »

mrlala wrote: post #131
pwthornton wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they had enough time to warn people ahead of time, they had plenty of time to push a fix to their system for this. We are literally talking about adding support for one more image format. Emails, tweets, texts are no excuse for broken products. The iPhone is the best selling model in the United States. It is on College Board to support its default image format. Good product design is owning your users' success. It…

Have to agree with this guy here.. if you are doing Q/A testing and you notice that an iphone doesn't work by default, you have a problem.

Perhaps it's the iPhone that's broken then.

HEIC isn't exactly a commonly used, or widely accepted image format outside of Apple's world.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#174

Post by zzyzxd »

xienyc wrote: post #101
coffeefirst wrote: post #49

"Our system broke, you're screwed now, sorry" is never an acceptable answer. Do they really not have anyone who knows how to get stuff done? 1. Take the files and figure out what to do with them so they can be read. This isn't a hard problem. 2. Ask everyone affected to email you the photo or a new photo of the documents. We'll just take it on trust that you do so honestly because there's no way you would've seen thi…

>"Our system broke, you're screwed now, sorry" is never an acceptable answer. That's not what happened at all. The college board admitted their fault and are letting students take the test again. Even without that, they mentioned in their FAQ that JPEGs and PNGs are the only file types acceptable and even sent out a tweet (which should have been an email) a week before especially for iPhone users to let them know how…

> The website got stuck on the loading screen until Bryner’s time ran out.

If I am to write a system that accepts user uploads, verifying the uploaded file and giving proper error message on failure would've been the first thing come to mind. In this case, per the article, the system was stuck. This is simply unacceptable.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#175

Post by _bxg1 »

generationP wrote: post #112
_bxg1 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It suggests that they didn't even bother to try the app on an iPhone, which is what probably half of their target users reach for when they need to take photos. That belies a significant degree of laziness and/or incompetence.

There is no "app". There's a website, from what I understand. Not everything needs to be tested on mobile. In their place I'd have left an option to upload non-supported formats "just in case" to leave a trail, without guarantee of acceptance; but this is not something I'd have expected them to do. I'm also wondering how many iPhone users have that .heic setting at its default value, as opposed to having switched to…

I was using "app" in the broad sense.

> Not everything needs to be tested on mobile

It does when it requires taking and uploading a photo in the year 2020. Especially when its target users are high school kids. What adult is going to use anything other than their phone to take an off-handed photo to upload somewhere these days? Much less a child who probably almost never uses a traditional computer.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#176

Post by SimonPStevens »

MattGaiser wrote: post #125
cm2187 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus the backend doesn't move fast. The .net framework only got a json serializer recently. I am not holding my breath for system.drawing to handle HEIC!

> The .net framework only got a json serializer recently. What do you mean by recently? I am not a .net user, but this seems quite basic.

gp is probably thinking of system.text.json which was only added to .net core in version 3, which less than a year old. But it's not been high priority to add because of a very well established open source project called JSON.net that has been around for ages.

However the full framework has had a different JSON serialiser (DataContractJsonSerialiser) since v3.5 in 2007.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#177

Post by bchociej »

save_ferris wrote: post #149
bchociej wrote: post #127

.

So you build a service that doesn’t properly validate or gracefully handle invalid file types and it’s my fault as the end user when I try to upload something and the system fails? If you build a service that can’t support one of the most commonly used platforms in the world, that’s on you the developer, not me the user. This is software engineering 101 right here, and was completely avoidable on the part of the deve…

.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#178

Post by bananabreakfast »

Hokusai wrote: post #150
jp555 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're suggesting bureaucratic "software" works better? I don't put as much faith in that as you.

> You're suggesting bureaucratic "software" works better? It works for building regulations, for electric regulations, for food safety regulations, for all the rest of industries actually. If anything we see people dying because that regulations are not enforced or are removed after lobbying. So, software is not going to be "better" but more reliable and a less costly foundation for the rest of business and industrie…

lol "works"

Regulate software and you will kill it.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#179

Post by dylancop »

pwthornton wrote: post #111
xienyc wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Our system broke, you're screwed now, sorry" is never an acceptable answer. That's not what happened at all. The college board admitted their fault and are letting students take the test again. Even without that, they mentioned in their FAQ that JPEGs and PNGs are the only file types acceptable and even sent out a tweet (which should have been an email) a week before especially for iPhone users to let them know how…

If they had enough time to warn people ahead of time, they had plenty of time to push a fix to their system for this. We are literally talking about adding support for one more image format. Emails, tweets, texts are no excuse for broken products. The iPhone is the best selling model in the United States. It is on College Board to support its default image format. Good product design is owning your users' success. It…

I disagree. Bowing down to the whims and fancies of corporations is how we got into this situation (in terms of media formats) in the first place. According to wikipedia, HEIC isn't even supported in any browser natively, clearly rolling it out this soon was a bad idea.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#180

Post by disabled »

winter_blue wrote: post #25

Someone at the College Board just needs to write a few lines of code to convert HEIC images to JPEG, instead of forcing thousands (if not more) students to retake the test. On Ubuntu, you can: sudo apt-get install libheif-examples heif-convert infile.heif outfile.jpg Based on the article, it sounds like the College Board did actually receive the test files from these students. The students were emailed that the files…

^ This. College Board messed up severely on this issue.
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